The Test

Thursday 23rd June, 10:50am. The day of driving destiny! The day to take my US driving test – all of 18 odd years after my last driving test. Although the test is designed for 15 year old Americans to pass I still felt rather nervous. The nerves were not helped by the stress of thinking I wasn’t going to make it to the test center in Renton due to the directions of a ridiculous (free) satnav app I had downloaded onto the phone. Tracy had the proper one as she had a day of leg waxing and kids birthday parties (unrelated activities).

After taking me on and off of freeways on a reasonably random basis and delivering me to a final destination that was clearly not my final destination, I arrived 10 minutes after my check-in time and 5 minutes before the test. For once though I didn’t have to sit around waiting and I was out in the car park waiting for my examiner to arrive in no time.

The examiner was called Sam-Sam. Or something like that. We started off with Sam-Sam checking the lights, front and rear, and then he asked me to show him my arm signals, starting with a right turn. Now as I had written about learning my arms signals the day before you would have expected me to actually learn them. However I hadn’t – safe in the knowledge that they knew I already had a licence and wouldn’t possibly bother asking me this kind of pointless questions.

If he had asked me to show him how to signal left as a starter it would have been ok – I know that one – but turning right I wasn’t too sure. I started to plead ignorance but saw from him face that that wouldn’t work and so I started to generally move my arm around into a variety of positions until he asked me how to indicate left. Amongst all the different poses I had tried I had clearly struck “right turn” gold however I’m still not sure what the actual right turn motion is but hey, never mind!

Next up was left turn which was easy. Slowing down took a couple of variations of hand movements (including a general flapping motion) and he seemed reasonable happy that I had at some point made the correct gesture – at least, he let me continue to the actual driving part of the test so I figure I may have got something right.

The majority of the driving test was fine, or at least I thought it was until Sam-Sam gave me my feedback later. I reversed round a corner, parked on a hill – including turning the wheel the right way on the off chance that it rolled away. Again to make sure I passed I made a good show of turning the wheel both ways so that he knew I was trying to do the right thing even if I wasn’t actually doing it.

We ended, 15 or so minutes later, back in the car park to do a quick spot of parallel parking. Of all the tasks this was actually the easiest because the parking space was a coned area and obviously large enough for some big old US cars to fit in so me positioning a small PT Cruiser in there was no problem.

I then parked the car in a final space and sat ready for judgement. It didn’t start well, Sam-Sam was clearly enjoying my misery – probably pay back for the rubbish efforts at arm signals. So the crime list read as follows…

1. I was too far away from the kerb when I reversed round the corner
2. I didn’t look behind me all the time while reversing round the corner (I think he’s wrong about that though!
3. At a stop junction I didn’t look far enough past a tree (don’t really know what he was talking about but I nodded and feared the worst)
4. Something about wide roads in the US and keep to a certain side on my side, blah, blah, I’d kind of switched off and wasn’t paying any attention any more

As Sam-Sam continued I was convinced I’d failed but then I looked at his clipboard and he drew a circle around “qualified”. Hurrah! He did continue to tell me more things I did wrong but I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested. I’d 88 out of 100 so I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. The smugness grew further when I sat waiting for my temporary licence and noticed that the gentleman who had taken his test at 10:55 had only scored 72 out of 100!

All that was left was to sit in a room with lots of “special” people for about 90 minutes so that I could get my temporary licence. The real one will be in the post in 7-10 days – how exciting!